Aerial vehicles, including miniature or small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), have unique constraints with respect to their control, their safety, and their reliability.
Some aerial vehicles known in the prior art, including many multicopters, use redundant effectors. However, effector redundancy only guards against very specific types of failure, and many other single points of failure remain and multicopters frequently crash as a result.
Solutions that guard against such failures exist for manned and teleoperated aerial vehicles. Examples include triple modular redundancy (TMR) and voting systems. However, these solutions have been developed to fit the cost-risk tradeoffs found in manned and teleoperated aerial vehicles, which greatly differ from those of aerial vehicles. Moreover, most of these solutions rely on—and even encourage or mandate the use of—human pilots, which is impractical for many potential applications of aerial vehicles due to cost as well as technical reasons. For example, teleoperation by a human pilot requires a real-time, high-bandwidth data link between an aerial vehicle and the human operator, which requires hardware that is too costly, too power-hungry, and too heavy for many potential applications of aerial vehicles; which is difficult to maintain in a redundant way, hence constituting a possible single point of failure; and which increases the complexity of the overall system and is hence a likely cause of reduced safety or reliability.
Considering the relative expensiveness of some aerial vehicles (e.g., technically refined multicopters) and of some payloads (e.g., specialized sensors) and the risk of damage or injury potentially caused by aerial vehicles, it is desirable to avoid the loss of an aerial vehicle or its payload, damage to an aerial vehicle or its payload, damage to an aerial vehicle's operating environment, or injury of a person or bystander, even in case of a failure.
It is an aim of the present invention to obviate or mitigate the limitations/disadvantages of existing aerial vehicles.